They say that if you want to catch fish, you gotta go where the fishermen ain't. My philosophy: You have to get your inspiration from places others don't or won't. Few things are worse than the parroting of wisdom received from folks who aren't all that wise. Also, this blog has a kind of cool acronym.

Monday, December 08, 2014

Remembering One of Metal’s Greatest Guitarists, Ten Years After His Murder

It’s difficult to overstate the impact that guitarist “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott and his band Pantera had on the music industry in general and the health of the metal genre in particular. Pantera steadily built up a following during the 1980s and, by 1994 (when heavy metal was deemed a hopeless musical anachronism), delivered the first extreme metal album to debut at #1 on the Billboard charts, Far Beyond Driven.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the guitarist’s untimely death at the hands of a deranged fan, who charged the Alrosa Villa stage with a handgun during a performance of Dime’s post-Pantera project, Damageplan. As I reflect on where I was when I heard the news the next day (a notably cold morning in my drafty living room in Alameda, Calif.), here are lessons that I feel Dime teaches us a decade later.

The Importance of Family and Taking the Long Way

Pantera, at least in the beginning and through its heyday, was more or less a family business, with Dime’s brother Vinnie on drums and the albums recorded at their father’s studio in Amarillo, Texas. This early bond would survive temptation and, thus, solidify Pantera’s place among the very best and most revered metal acts.

Lacking a lead guitarist, Megadeth was looking for someone to fill the empty slot and Dime found himself at the top of this list. Pantera at the time was largely a club act in Texas and Megadeth was one of the “Big Four” bands in thrash metal--the temptation to make the move was obvious.

Dime had one condition for signing up: That Megadeth also hire his brother Vinnie as the drummer. The band balked and so did Dime… right out of the gig. It was a good thing too, because a trio of truly groundbreaking Pantera albums followed: Cowboys From Hell, A Vulgar Display of Power, and the aforementioned Far Beyond Driven.

This story struck a particular chord with me, as I’m employed by a family business that has received many acquisition offers during it’s 62 years of business and is, today, the largest in its field by revenue. Such a move to a high-profile act like Megadeth would have most certainly but Dime on the fast track to metal stardom. However, he passionately believed in Pantera’s shared vision and, most importantly, the value of family.

Remembering What It Was Like to Be a Fan

Businesses all too often forget what it was like to be the people who had the itch that inspired them to found the company that scratched it for others. Dime’s gonzo, tireless, liver-abusing joie de vivre was only matched by--perhaps even fueled by--a love for the band’s fans. This was, in turn, inspired by the fact that he often felt he was one of them, merely just fortunate enough to be on the other side of the stage. (It’s worth noting that he wore a neckchain with a razorblade pendant, a gift from his longtime girlfriend as a tribute to the classic Judas Priest album British Steel.)

It’s hard for many of us to imagine staying humble after, say, reaching the pinnacle of music stardom or even, much earlier, getting banned from guitar contests after winning so many of them. Much like Ronnie James Dio, whom I wrote about earlier this year, Dime wouldn’t stop hanging out or signing autographs until every fan felt that they got what they came for.

Thus, fans eventually adopted one of Dime’s catchphrases: “getcha pull,” as in “Here’... Getcha pull off of this bottle of beer.” It has since come to mean something along the lines of “Get the most out of this experience” or “Do what you need to do to have a good time.”

The Power of Remembering the Little Things

Dime’s favorite cocktail (and I admit a certain fondness for it myself) was the “Black Tooth Grin.” Named for a lyric in a Megadeth song, it was composed of Seagram’s 7 or Crown Royal with a tiny splash of cola, consumed as a shot.

Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian recalls that, while he loved partying with Dime, his host’s choice of whiskey was too sweet for his particular tastes. (By then, Ian admits to have become a “bourbon snob.”) Much later, the next time they got together, Dime ushered Ian to the catering table, lifted the tablecloth, and showed him the bottles of Maker’s Mark that he got just for him. “Just so you know, your Black Tooths are made with that.”

That backstage hospitality we try to have – it all came from Pantera. [Guitarist] Dimebag Darrell was the nicest...guy in the world. He could walk in and do a shot of Crown Royal with Justin Bieber, with Rick Nielsen, with James Brown – he was everybody's best friend. And you could feel that energy when he was playing.

After that day, I was like, “From now on, everybody's allowed in this room. I don't care if it's Britney Spears.” I became the backstage best friend. Whenever I showed up at a festival, the first thing I'd do is grab a bottle of whiskey and go knocking on doors to see who the funniest people are.”

As Anthrax’s Ian separately recalls, “Once you shared drinks with that guy, you became a part of his extended family. He really did put his family and friends first, and for him, everyone was his family.”

It is easy to say Dimebag is gone, that he died in 2004 and that was that. It wasn't though. Randy Rhoads died and Ozzy kept putting out records. Cliff Burton died and Metallica kept touring. (Whether either was ever the same is another matter.) When Dimebag died, things ended with him. People understood it then, just as they do now. You can't replace Dime. You just can't.

Friday, November 14, 2014

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at the annual summit for one of our clients, Project Lead the Way. PLTW is the nation’s leading provider of learning programs in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), which not only includes K-12 curricula but professional development for teachers as well.

My talk focused on what I felt were five defining forces that make now a critical moment for STEM education.

Friday, October 03, 2014

[Do] different physical media convey different levels of presumed authority? Any PR professional who has ever had an executive ask “…but is it in the print edition?” knows that, at least generationally, there’s a vestigial preference for paper as a means to convey a level of importance or permanence.

Fortunately, my employer feels the same way. For the last two-and-a-half years, I’ve been allowed time to administrate Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement (CREWE), a Facebook group I co-founded to address these issues. For several years, Wikipedia has been the only online destination explicitly mentioned in the firm’s online behavior policy, which I curate.

There are many reasons why I think public relations practitioners will only be as good at online community engagement as they are in participating in Wikipedia. Here are four of them.

1. It Takes Title and Authority Out of Your Communications Toolbox

Like many environments that hew to the hacker and open-source ethos, it isn’t your title, social status, race, gender, creed or religion (or otherwise “bogus criteria”) that gets you in the door — it’s the quality and spirit of your contributions. When you think about it, not even Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales’ status as Wikipedia’s co-founder has as much pull as you think it might in the traditional sense. In fact, one of the most annoying things someone can do on Wikipedia is engage in argumentum ad Jimbonem.

2. You Have to Actually Be Persuasive

I’ve often lamented that public relations practitioners as a group, foranumber of reasons, have been slowly losing their ability to persuade — to simplify a complex concept, build an argument, make a case, present it and be responsive to the results. Though you do occasionally run into people on Wikipedia who will neither be made happy nor deign to consider your point of view, this is actually true of any venue. Your chances of success on your company’s behalf jump dramatically if you can construct a cogent and well-supported argument in the full public view that Wikipedia demands.

So, that’s the bad news. The good news is that, if you master those rules and norms, it’s like swinging two bats in The Great Online Engagement On-Deck Circle — understanding the desired behaviors of other online communities becomes comparatively easier.

4. It Teaches the Value of Maintaining an Ongoing Relationship

Sam Whitmore of MediaSurvey once told me that a company’s relationship to online communities too often takes the form of the average person’s relationship to a neighbor with a pickup truck — the latter only gets contacted when someone needs something moved. If that’s the basis for the relationship, the truck-owner stops taking your call.

Similarly, I believe that a company should be a near-constant presence on the Talk page of its Wikipedia entry, not just when there are errors or disagreements on positioning or emphasis. Better yet, it should think about ways it could contribute to the sixth-most-trafficked site in the world in ways that do not involve a potential conflict-of-interest.

Though it has clearly taken some time to get to this point, these firms certainly don’t believe this announcement is the finish line. We also recognize the statement, by itself, isn't enough — actions count. This is the start of an industry-wide commitment. I hope that the PR industry and Wikipedians take this effort in the right spirit.

UPDATES

Here are some links to coverage about the announcement, as well as how the other signatories talked about the news. I'll be adding to this as coverage continues to pop up.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

When it comes to the value of expertise versus authority, hacker ethics (as developed over time by students at MIT and Stanford several decades ago) double down on the former and strongly resist the latter. This code, in fact, posits several recommended behaviors that I believe are central to the evolution of public relations. For the sake of compression, here are three.

Friday, May 16, 2014

I have a new piece up on LinkedIn and Edelman.Com on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of Ronnie James Dio's passing.

As a fan of heavy metal for nearly my entire life, I've always looked up to Dio for his dedication to this enduring genre, his frank demeanor and the passion he had for the global community (a “tribe,” really) of metal fans. For companies and brands, Dio offers lessons for staying relevant, becoming indispensable to your stakeholders and, in the end, having them miss you terribly if you were to leave.

Friday, May 02, 2014

Over at LinkedIn, I have a piece that makes the following claim: "PR Professionals Who Base Their Value Solely on Staying Between an Audience and a Company/Client Will Eventually Lose Both."

More:

If PR on the social web has taught us anything, is that people crave access. Sure, you get some traction by, say, sending free product and such, but those tactics (when used on their own) are a form of cheap currency — they devalue a company’s social capital over time. (Like economist Milton Friedman said about inflation, it’s like alcoholism in that you get the good effects first.) Almost anyone will take almost any product if given out for free. Yes, even if you’re giving away a supply of particularly well-crafted exotic booze, you haven’t really forged a relationship but merely a series of transactions.

Thursday, March 13, 2014

I have a new article published on my employer's site about Internet freedom in light of Sir Tim Berners-Lee's proposed "Internet Bill of Rights."

For staunch supporters of Internet freedom, Tuesday delivered evidence of one of the most satisfying self-inflicted injuries yet observed in U.S. politics. Senator Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate chamber to accuse the Central Intelligence Agency of secretly searching the Senate Intelligence Committee’s computers. Senator Feinstein, notably, is the chair of that very same oversight committee and has played a pivotal role supplying the legislative air-cover for the computer surveillance practices that so vexed the likes of renowned whistleblower Edward Snowden and others. (Mr. Snowden is enjoying his own uniquely earned schadenfreude. Of course, the CIA denies wrongdoing.)

Saturday, December 21, 2013

One afternoon as an undergrad at Saint Mary’s College of California, I was racing to the campus radio station where I was running late for my afternoon air-shift. As I turned the corner, I overheard the wonderful Brother Ray Berta (RIP) regaling one student with his latest big idea at the intersection of mass media and culture. Brother Ray was not a quiet man (a distinct advantage for a speech professor, I imagine) and so I managed to hear some of his conversation even in my haste.

“You see, the old pornography is just so-so,” he said. “But, now, the new pornography is…”

Okay... It was an odd statement coming from a Christian Brother.

A couple of weeks later, I asked Brother Ray what he was talking about that afternoon. It turns out he was specifically referring to talk shows like Jerry Springer’s, Maury Povich’s, and others of that ilk. Such programs encouraged people to put on display some of the more unusual, shocking and often even depraved aspects of American life, usually set up for maximum dramatic effect. With such intimate, awkward and sometimes obscene ugliness willingly offered by the shows’ guests every day over broadcast networks, he argued, any content depicting naked people having sex probably wasn’t that big a deal anymore.

“The old pornography was about skin,” he said. “The new pornography is about souls.”

This was the early 1990s, when most of the campus’ Internet connectivity was served by a single ISDN line. (It stood for “Integrated Services Digital Network” or, during peak periods, “It Still Does Nothing.”) Unless ASCII art delivered at 4,800bps was a turn-on (or you were incredibly patient), you weren’t going to get a whole lot of the “old” but USENET certainly offered plenty of evidence of the “new” even then.

Taken together, I can’t help but revisit Brother Ray’s thesis and wonder whether we’ve long ago entered the age of what he might have called The New, New Pornography.

The New, New Pornography is still about souls. It just comes at us at higher velocity from more directions (thanks to the social Web), and is frozen in a kind of digital amber (thanks to search). Further, we are simultaneously the “audience” and “bookers” of this show that is custom-fed into our browsers, based on our own interests, desires, and connections.

I’m certainly not a prude by any means. I found the FCC’s crusade against Janet Jackson’s bosom many times more offensive than the “wardrobe malfunction” itself, to say nothing of the cynical self-expansion of its mandate. (The expansion of the FCC’s mandate, that is, not the bosom’s.) In truth, the Internet is not the gleaming and relatively sanitized place that far too many marketers, communicators, and trade/business mags make it out to be. I wholeheartedly accept this as a fair trade for the nearly unfettered access to vast amounts of information, insight, and entertainment that I enjoy thanks to one of the most open communications platforms yet devised.

I imagine that we, dear reader, consume a lot of the same sources online and these stories crossed your field of vision multiple times too. In the context of the New, New Pornography (from skin to souls, delivered at high speed from multiple directions), it’s actually kind of tough to look down your nose at the skeezy dude that Google Street-level caught walking into the adult film store. You could, sure, but it’s kind of like the alcoholic telling the heroin addict that at least his vice enjoys a less-stigmatized status.

Code Of Conduct

Comments here are unmoderated and are operated on a use-until-abused basis. I will adopt a moderation policy if I feel that my visitors abuse this privilege.

I will delete any comment that is lewd, crude, lascivious, racist, sexist, libelous, off-topic, or injurious to the privacy of a non-public individual. Such users will be forever banned from commenting on this site.

From time to time, certain comments will be investigated if they appear to be marketing spam. The offending company gets one free pass before public censure.